Gol­da – a smokey, talky his­tor­i­cal biopic

We’re always hap­py to see Helen Mir­ren being able to strut her regal stuff in a his­tor­i­cal biopic, if only as a way to make us for­get all those bleached boss-bitch Fast and Furi­ous cameos. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Gol­da, is not a film which allows Miren to flex many of her sup­ple actor mus­cles, as it is a sto­ry large­ly con­fined to cramped, fea­ture­less rooms in which fugs of cig­a­rette smoke suck all the air out.

Indeed, one-time Israeli prime min­is­ter Gol­da Meir’s predilec­tion for chain-smok­ing through meet­ings, alter­ca­tions and even inqui­si­tions is one of the key visu­al sig­ni­fiers that this film is tak­ing place in the ear­ly 1970s. It charts, in rather fas­tid­i­ous detail, the build-up and fall-out of the Yom Kip­pur War of 1973, in which invad­ing forces from Egypt, Syr­ia and Jor­dan pre­pare a siege on Israel.

Indeed, direc­tor Guy Nat­tiv and writer Nicholas Mar­tin have opt­ed for an approach of infor­ma­tion­al bom­bast, where human dra­ma plays sec­ond (even third!) fid­dle to the reams and reams of tech­ni­cal jar­gon and attempts to relay the com­plex polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion for those who aren’t in the know. It’s admirable that the mak­ers have placed such import on the con­text and ram­i­fi­ca­tions of this world-shak­ing event, but the film often plays retooled meet­ing tran­scripts, or mono­logues that have been ripped direct­ly from text­books. Meir, in the end, is lit­tle more than a cypher for the plot.

The film does under­score the rad­i­cal nature of Golda’s tenure, and it’s intrigu­ing that she rarely inter­faces with oth­er women. Indeed, it’s as if Nat­tiv is attempt­ing to sub­li­mate her gen­der as a way to cel­e­brate the force­ful­ness of her per­son­al­i­ty, and while it does too often feel bogged down in box-tick­ing his­to­ry, it does present its sub­ject as some­one who was so tough that ingrained misog­y­ny rarely even reg­is­tered with her. In that sense, she was some­thing of an exception.

Mean­while, Nat­tiv strug­gles to add a lay­er of excite­ment to pro­ceed­ings, exper­i­ment­ing with sound design and cam­era move­ment as a way to enliv­en the scads of con­ver­sa­tion, but it doesn’t quite work. The high­light of the film comes right at the end where we see some archive footage of Gol­da inter­act­ing with some of her sup­port­ers, and it’s nev­er a good sign in these endeav­ours when real­i­ty is so much more elec­tri­fy­ing and vital than the fiction.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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